She was only sixteen, only sixteen
I loved her so
But she was too young to fall in love
And I was too young to know

We'd laugh and we'd sing
And do the little things
That made my heart glow
But she was too young to fall in love
And I was too young to know

Why did I give my heart so fast
It never will happen again
But I was a mere lad of sixteen
I've aged a year since then

She was only sixteen, only sixteen
With eyes that would glow
But she was too young to fall in love
And I was too young to know

Then why did you give your heart so fast
Oh, it never will happen again
But you were a mere lad of sixteen
I've aged a year since then

She was only sixteen, only sixteen
With eyes that would glow
But she was too young to fall in love
And I was too young to know
But she was too young to fall in love
And I was too young to know

For a while, I clung to this song as a bit of reassurance that I wasn’t a freak. I was fifteen, I had been in high school for a whole year, and I had no desire to fall in love. I had done so once with painful results and subsequently sworn it off completely.

The thing that really bothered me was that everyone else was in love. It was impossible to avoid the topic anywhere I went: books, movies, music, innocent conversation. There were all sorts of social rules regulating how one could fall in love, but it was never said that one had to. Why, then, was it so inherent in the culture? We had talks about the seriousness of love, lectures on the dangers of premarital sex, and approving nods when we talked of devotion over passion, yet it was always assumed that everyone was going to be falling all over each other as soon as we hit puberty.

Was this a given? I was happy to hear this song one day on the radio, goofy as it seemed. Here, at least, was one girl who was still not capable of falling in love at sixteen. Perhaps it wasn’t a mandatory sentence, then! Of course, the thing was written in 1959, a time when the ideal girl was still based on rather Victorian models of female virtue. (I couldn’t help thinking that the girl sounded like a character Louisa May Alcott would write.) And anyway, most popular songs are written not to convey deep moral truth, but to sell records. So maybe this isn’t the most trustworthy source on whether I am, in fact, some sort of abnormal specimen removed from the rest of the lusty species. But I’ll retain hope. Maybe somewhere, somehow, it is okay for a fifteen-year-old not to have undergone this particular rite of passage.